Floods, wildfires and extreme weather events are natural disaster risks of the highest concern across Europe. The concerns regarding droughts and water scarcity are rapidly increasing across the Union. In 2020, 24 Member States considered droughts and water scarcity to be key emerging or climate-related disaster risks, compared to only 11 Member States in 2015. Healthy soils are instrumental in ensuring resilience in relation to droughts and natural disasters. Practices that enhance water retention and nutrient availability in soils, soil structure, soil biodiversity and carbon sequestration increase the resilience of ecosystems, plants and crops to withstand and recover from drought, natural disasters, heatwaves and extreme weather events, which will become more frequent in the future due to climate change. In contrast, without proper soil management, drought and natural disasters cause soil degradation and make soils unhealthy. Improvement of soil health helps to mitigate the fatalities and the economic losses associated with climate-related extremes, which amounted to more than 182000 casualties and approximately 560 billion EUR in the Union between 1980 and 2021.
Text as published in the Official Journal, reproduced verbatim (including any typographical quirks of the source). For the authentic version, see EUR-Lex.
